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Design is not just about how something looks, but a “holistic experience,” says Joe Gebbia, co-founder of lodging site Airbnb.

Gebbia and fellow co-founder Brian Chesky, both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, approach their business as designers first, which sets them apart, Gebbia says.

Since launching in 2008, Airbnb has grown into a multi-billion-dollar company, with over 2 million listings in more than 190 countries and 34,000 cities around the world.

“I think if you look across Silicon Valley to companies that are at the stage we’re at, there’s nobody else who has that kind of composition,” says Gebbia, who was in Vancouver last week for the TED Conference. “It sort of breaks the mould of what a successful Silicon Valley company can do. It’s usually MBAs or engineers and they hire designers later, not design from the beginning. So it’s part of our DNA. It’s part of who we are and I think, as I spoke at TED, it’s one of the reasons we eventually took off.”

It’s not that they created anything new, he says, but “understanding the components of trust and designing for that” is what he feels they’ve achieved.

“How do you convince somebody to host a stranger for the weekend?” he says. “That’s not a trivial thing. It’s not something I think you can throw technology at, marketing at or sales at, we threw design at it because that’s all we knew and in doing so I feel like we brought a human touch to it, which is so needed.”

Design that makes people feel comfortable has allowed Airbnb to break through an age-old stranger-danger bias, he says.

“I think that we’ve grown up, at least in the United States, that strangers’ equal danger and I think that’s been holding us back. It held us back in the early days because people didn’t want to use our service, investors didn’t want to invest and we couldn’t make forward momentum because of that.”

Gebbia says it’s proven that people have a natural tendency to trust those who are most similar to themselves and the reverse is true, but they’ve learned through Airbnb that reputation trumps this. So if a person listing accommodation receives 10 or more good reviews, they get more bookings, regardless of how different they are from the person booking.

“High reputation beats high similarity,” he says.

In a design-centric approach, Gebbia and his team undertook a project they called “Snow White” to better understand the complete journey of an Airbnb user, from the moment they hear about the site to browsing it, booking, travelling and arriving at their accommodation.

“We mapped all this out,” he says. “And we realized we wanted to bring it to life visually so we got a storyboard artist from Pixar and he came over and storyboarded these cinematic frames to bring these moments to life and it’s been a really wonderful communication tool for us because it’s so visual, anyone in the company can understand it.”

Overcoming the trust bias has lead Gebbia and his colleagues to think about other biases out there that design could challenge and overcome.

“We are always exploring new and different things,” he says. “There’s a famous list from Silicon Valley of the 10 hottest companies from the 1990s; nine of them you’ve never heard of because they all went under. Technology moves so quickly you can’t get comfortable with the business you have today because technology will progress.”

Providing a platform for new artists and designers to show their work is something Airbnb began two years ago at The London Design Festival, with their A Place Called Home exhibition. Last year, they made an impact at Salone del Mobile with their Housewarming exhibition, created in partnership with Fabrica, in which 18 students from around the world (all Airbnb users) presented work based on the idea of “hosting someone.” And in December, Airbnb took part in Design Miami with the interactive installation Belong. Here. Now.

Later this year, in Tokyo, they’re tackling something that unsurprisingly, as leaders in the uncharted sharing economy, explores different ways of living; taking part in Japanese designer Kenya Hara’s annual House Vision exhibition, which explores concepts for future homes.

“No one could have predicted people sharing homes on this scale even 10 years ago,” says Gebbia. “They were designed around the idea of privacy and separation, so I want to (ask) the question, ‘What would it look like to design a shared home from the ground up?’”

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The Home Front: Airbnb founders have roots in design

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